


Our House

by HeyMcRaely



Category: The Young Ones (TV 1982)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2020-10-06 19:43:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20512451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeyMcRaely/pseuds/HeyMcRaely
Summary: Could have had pictures to capture these moments, too bad the camera's been sat on and broken.





	1. Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> A gathering of short scenes, textures, memories and lentils taken and tidied up from my tumblr.

Vyvyan falls asleep—literally _falls_ asleep—wherever he gets tired. Usually this is halfway through a stumble across his room, landing on the wooden floor in his boots. He drifts off to the sound of dogs barking, Madness’s drummer practicing the next street over, and rainstorms.

Rik falls asleep on his desk, his cheek pressed to crumpled notebook paper, transferring his scribbles about 19th-century Parisian classism in crooked lines across his face. His soundtrack is his own humming, a quiet radio on the sill, and the ticking of the clock.

Mike falls asleep (when he sleeps alone) tucked in royally under several plush comforters and wearing an eye mask. He drifts off to the same record every night: a recording of girls whispering and giggling, the player facing the door so anyone outside his room will hear.

Neil doesn’t fall asleep. Everyone knows sleep gives you cancer. But he wakes up in the morning sometimes with his guitar in his lap, head against the wall, the flaking paint caught in his hair, having passed out hours before listening to the creaking of the house and birds tweeting the sunrise.

Petyr closes their eyes and blinks themself out of this plane of existence.


	2. Parade

Rick attends the pride parade just to stick it to the fascists. Sticks a couple more pins in his lapel. Quotes Cliff Richard songs at the police. Ends up getting hit on by a couple cute guys, to whom he is absolutely oblivious, and anyway the minute he opens his mouth they can’t get away fast enough. Vyvyan shows up too, in a crash helmet, calling everybody poofy. Rick ends up quibbling with him via poetry. Because the safety of this event is clearly in the hands of The People's Poet. He delivers a particularly dramatic stanza; a beat of silence...and Vyvyan tackles him to the ground. They wrestle in the middle of the street. Paraders assume the two of them are dating. Neither Vyvyan or Rick are aware of any of this. Foot traffic flows around them. They finally stumble home, scraped and bruised and smelling like summer to see Neil’s dangled a pride flag out of the second floor window.


	3. Autumn

Vyvyan and a leaf blower, stolen from somewhere, are clearing the yard of fallen leaves and the house of anything that’s not glued down. The posters are off the walls and the rugs are on the fence.

Neil is meditating in the front yard, right where the sunlight falls on him, slow and tired and golden in the afternoon. He listens to the sound of cars passing like wind through a forest. Or air through a leaf blower.

Mike claps dust from his hands and it suspends in the dry attic air. He shifts a cardboard tower, swapping his summer clothes for his sweaters. He boxes up his sandals, his silk shirts, and those illegally-lemon overalls Rick will never, ever find up here.

Rick picks apples from the neighbor’s tree. Most are already on the ground, landed rightfully on the near side of the fence. They’re kind of withered. And small. Okay they’re crabapples. And when Vyvyan and his leaf blower become insistent that Rick needs a wilder hairstyle, they’re very good for throwing.

They’re also, it turns out, very good for breaking hippies’ concentration.

And attic windows.

That night the housemates gather all the leaves and posters, the summer clothes and the meditation mats and build a bonfire in the back garden. It’s big and orange and sprinkles embers into the black sky. The smell of smoke and cooked apples sticks to the whole neighborhood. People open their windows, press their faces to the night, musing that it’ll be a miracle if that godforsaken student house is still standing at daybreak.


	4. Breakup

Curtains drifting, room dark but for gray seeping like cold watercolor from the window. Ceiling leaking. Rick breathes out. Flat sour smell of the pillow, something burning downstairs, poetry torn up on the bedspread, muffled yelling through floorboards, whole world blurred, “Rick, are you crying, man?” “OPEN UP YOU SOPPING BABY!” “Rick, Neil’s baked a cake for SPG’s birthday--” (”I HELPED!”) “--Now there’s a slice for you downstairs. It may not be from your sweetheart but consider it care of Marie Antoinette.” The ripped up bits of poetry overlap and disjoint and make new useless meaning: _rotten affection / walls fall / like / bombs bombs bombs / want_

Footsteps clump away, creaking the staircase. A last quiet voice through the wooden door: 

“Em, hello, u-uh Rick? You left those flowers you know, the ones that died? You left them on the sill, few months ago...they were starting to really smell...and well it’s bad karma to have something, y’know, dead in the house.”

“Throw them out, Neil.” Rick wishes there was a way to close his eyes tighter.

“No no man, I thought they’d be rubbish, but I pressed them instead.”

A crinkle at the bottom of Rick’s door, the slit of hall light shadowed as something flat is slid under. 

“Oh this rug’s disgusting.” Rick gets a little smile in spite of himself. Feet patter around outside, various mutterings, returning a minute later scratching. A broom. More mutterings, Rick hears “Vyvyan” and “vaccuum cleaner”.

He stares at the place on the floor where the flowers should be. Shapes in the dark. Flattened and dry and rotted between sheets of paper. Like his poetry...like his poetry.

Rick sits up, reaches hastily for his notepad on his desk. Begins to scribble. _my love for you dies on the page like flowers dried out of rain..._


End file.
